Friday the 13th (1980 version) [unrated edition]

FRIDAY THE 13^th (1980 version) [unrated edition]

I'll be taking a look at the first four films in the Friday the 13^th franchise this autumn. Spoilers abound, so don't read on if you've never seen these slasher gems and want to discover them for yourself.

The original Friday the 13^th follows a young woman named Alice Hardy who is part of a small crew fixing up an isolated summer camp along idyllic Crystal Lake in June of 1980. Alice (an artist who “draw[s] very well” according to her employer) toils alongside other young adults: a vegetarian named Brenda, a prankster known as Ned, another dude called Bill, and a couple (Jack and Marcie). The members of this group paint docks by the lake, nail up sagging rain gutters, and fix up an archery range, all totally unaware that the town's self-proclaimed “messenger of God” (Crazy Ralph) is utterly correct when he intones “You're all doomed.”

In the fifth season of the sitcom Seinfeld, the protagonist's neighbor (an eccentric fellow named Kramer) writes and sells a coffee table book about coffee tables. Some fifteen years earlier, film producer Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller hatched the brilliant idea of creating a movie set at a summer camp with a plot worthy of being told around campfires. Indeed, the film's first sequel includes a literal campfire scene.

In his book Making Friday the 13^th: The Legend of Camp Blood, David Grove quotes Victor Miller as saying, “I came up with the summer camp idea and it seemed perfect except for the fact that there were lots of kids at summer camp. Where's the terror in that? That's when I thought that it was a summer camp that was just about to open... we had to have these kids who are totally on their own with no one to help them. Total isolation.”

Sean S. Cunningham directed the film from a Victor Miller script that included substantial uncredited rewrites by Ron Kurz (who went on to have sole credit as writer of the film's first sequel). The plot that unfolds in the final product opens with a five-minute prologue set at Camp Crystal Lake in 1958 (a place that a sign indicates was founded in 1935). Two counselors sneak off to an isolated room to sate their carnal needs, but before their romp progresses beyond making out, they're interrupted by an off-camera assailant who kills them both. The narrative then moves to June 13^th in 1980. Nine minutes pass before the protagonist (Alice Hardy) makes her first appearance. Alice's boss (Steve Christy) vanishes from the proceedings for half an hour; he heads into town eighteen minutes into the film and doesn't reappear until the forty-eight minute mark. Thus, Alice and her co-workers have ample time to get into unsupervised trouble.

Jack and Marcie wander around the camp and are outdoors when a thunderstorm commences thirty-six minutes into the tale. Just before the rain falls, Marcie tells Jack about a recurring dream she's had in which “rain turns to blood.” It's a quietly chilling moment and one that has stuck in my craw. Some critics assert that the Friday the 13^th films are nothing more than one gory scene after another, but subtle chills like this one permeate the first movie.

Jack and Marcie sneak into a cabin to have sex during the storm, unaware that the corpse of Ned (whose death scene is not depicted) lays in the upper bunk above them. Meanwhile, Alice plays “strip Monopoly” with Brenda and Bill. Alice smokes a joint and nearly removes her shirt (the game's interrupted before she unbuttons too far), which contradicts the viewpoint voiced by some critics that only goody-goody virginal girls survive slasher films. Marcie leaves Jack alone in the cabin and heads out for some post-coital use of the self-contained washroom building, and in her absence someone hiding beneath Jack's bed shoves an arrow up through the mattress and right on through Jack's throat. Approximately four minutes later, the killer embeds an axe in Marcie's face. Ten minutes later, Brenda dies off-camera at the archery range. Seven minutes after that, boss Steve makes it back to camp only to be knifed in the stomach. Bill is the next to perish, albeit off-camera. Alice (who inexplicably takes a nap shortly after she finds a bloody axe in Brenda's bed) awakens and sets out to locate Bill. When she stumbles upon his corpse, she realizes that she's in mortal peril and barricades herself in the counselors' main headquarters. Headlights appear outside, and Alice (who thinks that Steve has returned) runs outside to be greeted by a woman who identifies herself as “Mrs. Voorhees... an old friend” of the family that owns that camp. Alice attempts to explain that her peers are all dead, but Mrs. Voorhees seems unfazed and heads into the cabin where Alice had been barricaded. In there, she gushes some exposition about how her son Jason drowned at the camp in 1957 while the counselors who were supposed to supervise him were off “making love.” Mrs. Voorhees reveals herself to be the killer when she explains that she could not let Camp Crystal Lake reopen again. She pulls out a hunting knife and lunges at Alice, who fights for her life. Eventually the two women end up on the shore of Crystal Lake, where Alice decapitates Mrs. Voorhees with a machete.

In her book Games of Terror, Vera Dika describes Friday the 13^th as “a film where elaborate characterization and motivation would only get in the way of the rhythmic progression of shocks.” Indeed, most of the characters are thinly-drawn; Brenda has a couple of lines that reveal she is a vegetarian, and Ned goofs around more than Bill and Jack, but the project will never be remembered as a character-centric piece.

Atmospheric and unsettling, Friday the 13^th remains a seminal and prototypical slasher film nearly thirty-five years after its theatrical release. I hadn't looked at any movies from this franchise for over a decade (I used to see the first four films in heavy rotation on cable TV during the mid-to-late 1980s) before I began revisiting them on Blu-ray as part of my annual horror movie festival, and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that the film that spawned the series still retains its crude charm despite a rather slow first act (after the prologue, the viewer spends a long set of scenes following Annie, a young woman who has been hired to be the camp's cook, as she makes her way toward Crystal Lake by hitchhiking). For first-time viewers, there are ample red herrings in terms of suspects who could be the killer (certainly Crazy Ralph and Steve Christy seem creepy and possibly dangerous). For those who have seen the film numerous times before, there are always new details to discover (I noticed a sign that indicates there's a “Lake Tomahawk” thirteen miles beyond Crystal Lake). Often dismissed as a silly gore-filled simple slasher movie, Friday the 13^th is a work of art worthy of serious examination in the eyes of this reviewer. There's a reason the mythos of Camp Crystal Lake resonated with viewers strongly enough to launch a lucrative multi-film franchise. The third act in particular is dense with a sense of dread and suspense. I'm glad I opted to re-examine these stories in the autumn of 2014.